Lincoln lied, people died
Lincoln lovers like to claim that the Constitution ratified in 1788 forbade peaceful secession and authorized a federal government of so-called limited, delegated powers to invade and occupy any seceding state, declare martial law, subdue secessionists by force, burn and ransack entire cities and then establish a military dictatorship over those states lasting a dozen years.
Suppose this indeed is the case, and that it was perfectly constitutional to intentionally wage war on civilians, to imprison without trial thousands of Northern citizens, jail – even execute – people who refused to take an oath of loyalty to Lord Lincoln, declare martial law, confiscate private property, censor telegraph lines and shut down newspapers for opposing the war, incarcerating their editors and owners. Say, for the sake of argument, that it was indeed lawful to suspend the Bill of Rights, the writ of habeas corpus and the international law.
If it endorsed, or even accommodated, what Lincoln did, including his disregard for the Ninth and 10th Amendments, and his violation of the Second, then the Constitution is categorically evil and self-contradictory.
Lincoln didn’t “save” the Union, which was a voluntary association of free people. Instead, Lincoln led a successful counter-revolution against the principles of 1776. Thanks to Lincoln, it is the government that is sovereign, and if a few hundred thousand must be sacrificed to preserve that government, then so be it.
Harold
First amendment aside, I wish to God we could call a moratorium on dumbass teabaggers with single-digit IQs calling everybody else ‘ignorant’. It really is your guys’ favorite word ain’t it? Do you just like the sound of it or something? Yup. I’m not impressed by your one-dimensional non-logic and felonious intellectual dishonesty filtered through some shitty quasi-fascistic worldview filter… so, somehow, I’m ignorant? Because I’m not awed by the kind of vapid crap that makes drooling conserva-zombies who haven’t experienced a cogent thought since third grade run out to vote for Rand Paul, I’m ignorant???
Go bite a pillow and cry, dipwad, because reality is making you its bitch in the real world beyond the sweaty confines of your masturbatory blog.
The South was not the ONLY place in the United States where slaves were owned. New Jersey owned them – though they didn’t call them slaves but “apprentices for life.” Kentucky and (the unconstitutional) state of West Virginia as well as Maryland and the District of Columbia owned slaves. What then? Only SOUTHERN slavery was wicked? And if slavery was wicked and the people involved should have been exterminated, what about the people who went to Africa and BOUGHT those slaves, brought them here and sold them for huge profits? Were they GOOD because they were New England Yankees and Pennsylvania Quakers?? Get your head out of your…the sand. Slavery was not the main issue at all; the main issues were, among many others, taxes and a tyrannical federal government. Also “corporate welfare” – yes, Lincoln loved his fascist government/commerce links. Lincoln needed the South to finance his “American System” of corporate welfare and, as has always happened under such circumstances, the industrialists and the politicians created a cozy – and corrupt – little system of government that eyed the States of the South as a huge cash cow, an economic colony reduced to political impotence by is lack of population.
As for your sentiments regarding black slavery and the guilt of the South: Lincoln and the North HATED blacks; they wouldn’t even allow them to ENTER states like Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Wisconsin etc. etc. Google “black codes” and you’ll find that the Union wasn’t egalitarian, it was far more racist than the South! Meanwhile, in the South, there were FREE blacks and many of them owned slaves!
So your “reasoning” simply ISN’T. It is a hodge-podge of error and ignorance, the mere recitation of long taught lies and half-truths. And today, states like Wisconsin, Arizona and others trying to stave off the tyranny of Washington have discovered that the South wasn’t the ONLY loser in Lincoln’s war! Every Sovereign State and every American lost – and lost big time.
The issues only seem complex because you choose to throw up chaff to try and obfuscate your indefensible position. You remind me of old-school communists in the West who used to try and defend Stalin by resorting to almost impossibly distorted logic and convoluted arguments. Nice try, but you completely tip your hand with the ridiculous statement that descendants of slaves are better off than if their ancestors stayed in Africa. Yay, all cheer for slavery! Are the descendants of the Jews who suffered in the holocaust similarly better off? Did Hitler do them as big a favor as Jefferson Davis and the slave traders did for blacks? 1-2 million Africans died en route, then more still once they actually made it here. WTF? You think that’s in any way defensible? Sorry if disapproving of the ownership of other human beings is drinking the Kool Aid to you. Perhaps I should be more pragmatic and mature and realize that genocide, slavery and the denial of basic human rights are sometimes beneficial.
Frankly, the Union ran very well with slavery intact. The North made money on the trade itself and on the products produced by slave labor. Northerners even kept slaves despite all the propaganda to the contrary. New Jersey’s slaves were made “apprentices for life,” but slaves they remained. Indeed, Lincoln opined that the slaves in that state would be freed – by 1914! As well, the last Yankee slave ship sailed from Africa in 1862 – so let’s not bemoan the slave economy and insist that it only profited the South.
It wasn’t slavery that was the problem even among those who wished to end it North AND South (and yes, before radical Yankee abolitionism, the South had a flourishing abolitionist movement), but what to do with “the African.” Northern states had “black codes” forbidding blacks to move or even enter those states and the South had not yet put into place the means of educating the slave to take his place in a free society though many prominent Southerners were working toward that end. As well, there were many FREE blacks in the South and quite a percentage of them OWNED slaves, so this wasn’t altogether a “black vs. white” issue.
But if you think that slavery “tore the country in two” (it didn’t because most whites didn’t care about it), what do you think total war with the killing of civilians and the destruction of eleven states did? The only reason that the issue remains alive today is because the race mongers, poverty pimps and politicians need it to fuel a mindset of victimization and entitlement. Considering that the descendants of black slaves (and there were also white slaves if you didn’t know) are far better off than they would have been had their ancestors remained in Africa, I would point out that it’s time for the NAACP and others in the “black community” to get on with living in the here and now, which is something demanded of Southerners all the time though they are still suffering the effects of an unjust, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional war and an ongoing attempt at cultural genocide.
These issues are very complex. They have been presented as simple because it profits the politically correct multi-cultural crowd to make villains of white Southerners in order to further their agenda. If you prefer simplicity to the truth, that’s your choice but you have no right to demand that everyone else drink that particular Kool Aid.
You see no irony in portraying an economic system based on the literal ownership of human beings tearing the country in two as more true to freedom and liberty than Lincoln’s United States? Are you insane???
It isn’t a lie, RL, it’s the facts, period. Lincoln WAS a tyrant and he did what he did not to save the Union – since a union by gunpoint is conquest and occupation – and neither did he do it to “free the slaves” since to keep Southern tax revenues which provided 75+% of the federal government’s money he helped draft and promote prior to his inauguration the original 13th (Corwin) Amendment which would have placed slavery IN THE CONSTITUTION in perpetuity. Furthermore, as written, that Amendment COULD NOT BE LATER REVOKED.
No, “Lincoln’s War” (it was NOT a “civil war”) was the bloodiest war in our nation’s history and brought about the end of the Republic as established by the Founders. Politically astute historians consider the War of Secession to be our nation’s own French Revolution, a far cry from the original American Revolution. It was certainly the end of many things including the concept of the power of the sovereign states, the sanctity of the Bill of Rights and the ORIGINAL Constitution (what we have now is a travesty that is routinely ignored by the courts) and the concept of the power of the People not as some communist “mass”, but as citizens of their respective States which is the fundamental position upon which the nation was founded. Everything that Lincoln wished to achieve – all of which was contrary to the Founding Principles – has led us to where we are today. Professor Jay Hoar of Maine, a scholar of the period, has pointed out that “the worst fears of the boys in gray” had come to pass: “a federal government completely out of control.”
This is the most pathetic heinous garbage I’ve read in a long time. What next? Maybe some historical revisionism on Hitler or some holocaust denial? This ain’t so much intellectual dishonesty as mental rape for any drooling idiot out there who’d give you more than second’s credence. In the name of reason, quit.